Belief & Intention · Mind & Practice

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○ It looks toward the future, persists in dreams, and explores life’s meaning. In personal growth, firm ambition enables us to navigate life’s storms and face challenges and difficulties better.

● Establish action: put intentions into practice

○ After ambition comes turning it into practical steps. Establishing action emphasizes doing, putting promises to oneself into practice rather than remaining with theory and dreams. Through practice in cultivation and realization, we can truly understand life’s meaning and the principles by which the world works.

● Establish virtue: develop character through action

○ Like the story of “Mencius’s Mother Moving Three Times,” establishing virtue means character and qualities accumulated through action. It represents moral ideas, values, and attitudes toward life. In personal growth, cultivation, and realization, virtue is the core, determining a person’s value and influence.

○ Throughout life, continually pursue noble moral character and cultivation, striving to become pure in character and upright in conduct. Whatever difficulties or temptations arise, persist in moral principles, letting conscience and morality guide conduct.

○ Virtue is established not only for oneself, but to benefit society. A person of high morality can become a social example, influence others, and bring positive energy to all society.

● Establish achievement: extending influence

○ Like the story of “The Foolish Old Man Removing the Mountains,” after virtue is established, personal values and character influence conduct and decisions, producing profound effects in society, family, and teams.

○ Achievement embodies this influence, affirming and recognizing personal value. Continually strive to create value in different fields and at different levels, bringing positive change to society, family, and organizations. Achievement means not only ideals but practice, advancing the world through actual action.

○ Do not settle for momentary success or results; contribute to society continuously and tirelessly, creating lasting value.

● Establish lasting words: transmitting wisdom

○ Like the story of “The Hundred Schools Contending,” lasting words are the final fruit of personal growth, cultivation, realization, and development.

○ They share experience, wisdom, and insight with others, helping them grow and progress.

○ Lasting words are not merely oral transmission, but examples of conduct, attitudes, and values. Share insights, experience, and wisdom in life through words as well as conduct. Establishing lasting words means taking responsibility for passing on knowledge and ideas, inspiring others and guiding them upward.

○ Lasting words also contribute to later generations. Good words and ideas are seeds that can take root and sprout in others’ hearts, becoming treasures passed through generations.

Return to goodness

Act

Without goodness, there is no basis for establishment

In all pursuits and practices, accumulating goodness is ultimately the highest standard and destination. “Goodness” has five dimensions:

● Good thoughts: the origin of thought

○ Every action and feeling begins with a thought. Good thoughts are our initial positive thinking and intentions, a yearning for kindness and uprightness. They begin all positive conduct, setting the first step’s direction on life’s road.

● A good heart: inner motivation

○ Sustained, accumulated good thoughts form a good heart: sincere feelings toward goodness and its continual pursuit deep within. This is our inner motivation and belief for continuing to do what is right.

● Good causes: the beginning of action

○ A good heart prompts concrete actions. Such positive conduct is a good cause, embodying good thoughts and heart, and directly causing future good outcomes.

● Good conditions: the environment’s response

○ Good causes trigger chain reactions in the external world, creating good conditions. These are positive external circumstances and factors arising from our positive conduct, as well as destined good opportunities and conditions.

● Good fruits: results manifest

○ All good thoughts, hearts, causes, and conditions ultimately lead to a result: good fruits. These complete and reward all previous steps, representing positive outcomes and returns.

Set right and put into practice

Do it

Without rightness, all is empty

In every practice, always maintain uprightness, uphold correct ways of doing things, and ensure conduct accords with moral standards. “Rightness” has five levels:

● Integrity: act honestly and fairly

○ Integrity is every entrepreneur’s inner principle and moral coordinate. It upholds truth, sincerity, and fairness, requiring truthfulness without falsity, concealment, or favoritism at every moment. In business, integrity means fair dealings, honesty and trustworthiness, and authentic self-presentation.

● Decency: treat the team fairly

○ Decency embodies integrity’s principles in teams and organizations. It requires preserving a fair team culture, treating every member equitably, and ensuring the undertaking’s direction aligns with team values.

● Justice: balance in business

○ Justice represents fairness and balance in the external market. In an undertaking, it requires fair and proper dealings with all partners, customers, and competitors, without harming others’ rights and interests, preserving normal market order.

● The right path: the course of development

○ The right path identifies an undertaking’s correct direction and course. It represents long-term, sustained, harmonious development, ensuring that pursuing profit also preserves social and environmental harmony and balance.

● Right livelihood: apply these principles in business

○ Integrity, decency, justice, and the right path ultimately appear in an undertaking’s results: right livelihood. It embodies all positive principles and values in actual business, completes and rewards the previous steps, and is the ultimate sign of success.

Human nature

Evil is in the flesh

Good intentions are in the soul

The heart and soul’s goodness cannot defeat the flesh’s evil

The two provoke each other

Only thinking and ideas that teach goodness are immortal

More experiences and participation

More transmission and sharing with the world

Though a hundred kalpas pass, deeds do not perish. When causes and conditions meet, one receives the karmic result oneself. Zengzi also said: “When a person loves goodness, though blessings have not arrived, calamity is already far away.”

“Heaven gives birth to all things through yang and completes them through yin. Birth is benevolence; completion is righteousness.” Goodness signifies benevolence; establishing signifies righteousness. Benevolence is essence, righteousness appearance. Begin with righteousness as the first stirring of intention, and return to benevolence as the guide to conduct. Cause and effect cycle, following the rule that without breaking there is no establishing, continually preserving, breaking, and establishing. Reach utmost emptiness, maintain profound stillness. All things arise together; I observe their return.

Life’s three immortalities are establishing virtue, achievement, and lasting words; to these I add ambition and action. Ambition is the starting point. Without it, setting out lacks righteousness and nothing can be accomplished. Without ambition comes no action, hence no virtue, achievement, or lasting words. Thus, at the level of my individual self, I aspire to become a planner, investing immense time and energy. Through experience in one business project after another, I bring upon myself every virtue a planner should possess, thereby establishing virtue. Through consulting, planning, and training that support business development, I establish achievement. Following universal values, I share all my consolidated experience and accumulation unreservedly with those who need it, continually producing content and spreading it through the internet, establishing lasting words. This entire process is ambition, action, virtue, achievement, and lasting words, summarized as “Begin by establishing.”

Benevolence is Heaven’s Way. Heaven creates all things: great goodness, kindness toward others, an altruistic heart, following the life values of revering heaven and loving people. One thought arises: myriad rivers and mountains, prosperity through countless ages; one thought ceases: seas become fields, loss through eternity. Good and evil differ by one thought. Good thoughts nourish a good heart, create good causes, enact good conditions, and produce good fruits. Initially, as a creed, use action to discipline nature and rules to govern the heart; ultimately rise to acting through goodness. The awakened awaken themselves, letting rules arise from the heart. This is summarized as “Return to goodness.”

“Begin by establishing, return to goodness”: eight Chinese characters for continual cultivation and contemplation within finite life. Practice lies in seeking, realization in knowing. Practice uses action to discipline nature; realization lets nature guide action. The awakened awaken themselves, letting rules arise from the heart; practitioners follow external discipline, using rules to govern the heart. Continually cultivate the individual self and realize the transcendent self, cycling repeatedly and improving the capacity for realization.

Brush away worldly splendor, illuminate the original heart: limpid purity, light filling the void.

This folder’s contents record insights arising from everyday matters, saved by category. Some came from exchanges and collisions of ideas with friends nearby, some from reflections summarized from books, and some from teachings by masters.

They concern the outside world, labels, genius, time, life goals, reality, regret, and so forth.

Sichuang Society

Thought: the highest realm

One thought arises: myriad rivers and mountains, prosperity through countless ages

One thought ceases: seas become fields, loss through eternity

In this world, a person’s birth has already determined their level in society. These barriers between levels were formed by the long operation of human social order. Thus the level into which the individual self is born cannot be crossed, but a breakthrough between levels can be made through thought: using logical thinking to contemplate the worldly order of the “human realm” and the great natural law of “Heaven’s Way.” From the perspective of the unity of “humanity” and “heaven,” the universe, heaven and earth, and all things exist full of value and meaning. Through logical thought, we can not only discover this value and meaning through our own effort and gain powerful resources of spiritual motivation; more importantly, we must realize this value and meaning in human society, seeking to construct a reasonable political and cultural order consistent with the great law of “Heaven’s Way.” Thus, whether grounded in the essence of “Heaven’s Way” or the order of “human relationships,” there is every reason to encourage people living in the secular world to “learn below and reach above,” hoping they will devote themselves to moral practices of “benevolence” and “righteousness,” to realize the life’s charge and ultimate value necessarily entrusted to human life as “Heaven’s mandate” flows down into it.

Heaven’s Way and Sagely Virtue

Heaven gives birth to all things through yang and brings them to completion through yin. Giving birth is benevolence; completion is righteousness. Thus the sage in a position of authority nurtures all things with benevolence and sets all people right with righteousness. When Heaven’s Way operates, all things follow it; when sagely virtue is cultivated, all people are transformed. Such great harmony and transformation, whose traces cannot be seen and whose workings no one knows, are called divine. Thus the multitudes under heaven have their root in one person. Can the Way be far away? Can its methods be numerous?

Tongshu, Chapter 11, “Following and Transformation”—Zhou Dunyi

Worldly rules

Money, a tool of the mortal world, is a tool for cooperation that you neither bring at birth nor take at death

Power, a tool of rule, is a management tool affecting the strength and scope of control

Reputation, a tool of word of mouth, is a calling card that lets you move through society’s various strata

As Zhou Dunyi writes in Tongshu, Chapter 11, “Following and Transformation”: “Thus the multitudes under heaven have their root in one person.” From this we can realize that the secular world is not complicated; it all comes down to human nature. Human nature is “power and status, money, material things,” which ordinary worldly people find difficult to escape. We therefore need to understand and accommodate human nature fully.

Concentration Can Give Rise to Insight

● Know where to stop, then you can be settled; settled, you can be still; still, you can be at ease; at ease, you can deliberate; deliberating, you can attain.

● Stillness gives rise to concentration, concentration to insight, insight to wisdom.

● Preserve, break, establish: the steadiest upward spiral

Whoever causes me pain makes me strong

Pain is the fastest gateway to self-cultivation for everyone who accomplishes great undertakings

Without difficulties and pain, a person cannot awaken

At this moment we suddenly realize

When we wish friends fair winds and favorable rain, we are actually wishing them a lifetime of mediocrity

For thousands of years, no one who accomplished great undertakings had smooth sailing

Never utter a word of discouragement. We entrust our souls to great undertakings!

Heaven is in my heart,

The earth is beneath my feet,

Within, a spirit embracing mountains and rivers,

Without, the whole of all beings,

Head reaching heaven, feet planted on earth, a soaring ambition in my heart, fearing nothing!

Observe our body, speech, and mind from within. Do charitable work and build a career with a pure heart.

In this process, your heart will become not only perfected but very strong. You need not ask for any blessings; they will all come naturally.

When you lack blessings, even if someone brings charcoal in the snow, you may not have a lighter at home to light it!

What is a person with energy? Someone living for more people!

How does energy come? “Borrowing”

For however many people you live, borrow that many people’s energy.

Simply put, live for all beings and you can borrow all beings’ energy!

Intention determines the direction of action; conviction determines persistence through difficulty.

True conviction is proved through long-term choices, not declarations.